Avec la série The Expanse, penser l’expérience du corps face aux images

oleh: Jean-Albert Bron

Format: Article
Diterbitkan: Association Française des Enseignants et Chercheurs en Cinéma et Audiovisuel

Deskripsi

Based on close observation of the SF series The Expanse, broadcast from 2015 to 2022, we measure the impact of the emotional and cognitive processes involved in the viewer's experience of the images on the construction of their psychic and physical identities. While the series offers viewers specific ways of reliving the decisive relationship that social and anthropological environments have with their own bodies, it also confronts them with the risks of dissolving the frameworks of identity that they construct at the interface between their intimate experience and the group to which they belong. The focus is on the ways in which the bodies represented are inscribed in an anthropological geography, on the processes of symbolic and narrative elaboration, and on the technology of the body that unfolds. We look at the ways in which the strength of the characters' identities is cracked, and the repercussions this has on the body-to-body relationship between the viewer and the images. The mystery of the 'protomolecule' is its agent and echo in narrative and mythological space. Drawing on the ideas and work of Nicole Brenez, Serge Tisseron, Raymond Bellour and Pierre Legendre, among others, we propose to link a theory of the cinematic experience as a place for the symbolic elaboration of the body, the construction and deconstruction of technologies of the body, to another theory: that of the filmic experience as a test of identity, through an experience of the emergence of the primitive body, of the vital flow of affects that links us to the indistinctness of early childhood. By taking into account the particular space of the series, we show that the relationship to the body is effectively modified - and in this way, the sensitive, affective and biological performances of the body itself - to the extent of the belief in the image that makes the filmic experience a form of magical ritual, a pivotal moment between social codes and instructions and the restitution of the biological body.